“According to the materials, Mamdani scored a 2140 out of 2400 on the SAT, placing him in the 89th percentile nationwide. At the time, this was below the median SAT score for admitted students at Columbia and, given the prevailing distribution by race, well below the median SAT score for Asian students, but likely well above the median SAT score for black students—hence, the advantage of marking “black.”
The wrinkle in the story, however, is that, despite having a father on the faculty and marking black on his application, Columbia rejected Mamdani. There are two plausible theories for why this happened. First, in general, Columbia is a highly competitive university with an admissions rate of less than ten percent, which means that candidates around the median will not make the cut.
Second, there is a possibility that Mamdani’s box-checking gambit backfired. The full application includes the name and contact information for his father, Mahmood Mamdani, and his mother, Mira Nair, both of whom are public figures and neither of whom is black. The application also included a flag noting that the elder Mamdani appeared to be “affiliated with Columbia” and another line noting the family’s address in an exclusive Manhattan neighborhood. With even cursory research, an admissions officer could have seen that Mr. Mamdani was neither black, nor underprivileged”